The score said 95. Google was missing thirteen pages.

A good score is not the same as being found

Legacy OB/GYN is a women's health practice in Frisco, Texas. We run its website and its technology, so when we built a new launch checklist for search, their site was the first one it checked.

The checklist covers what Google needs from a site: indexing, titles, headings, images, share previews, links, structured data and speed. Run against the live site on October 13, it scored 95.5 out of 100. Most owners would stop there.

Then we asked Google directly. Its URL Inspection tool, run on every page in the sitemap, said 54 of 67 pages were in its index. Thirteen were not. Four of those were pages Google had never heard of.

A checklist tells you whether each page is built correctly. It does not tell you whether Google can get to it.

What Google could not see

The header menus for Services and For Patients only appeared after a click. So did the answers on the FAQ page and the homepage. Patients never noticed. Google, which reads the page as it arrives, never saw any of it.

That mattered most for the pages those menus were supposed to reach. Nine of the 13 missing pages had one link or none pointing to them from the rest of the site. Pages with that few links were missing from Google at about five times the rate of the rest: 9 of 21, against 4 of 46.

The fix was not clever. The menus and answers are now in the page from the start, hidden until someone taps them. Every service page shows a short "Related care" section linking the services and articles that belong together. Every page can now be reached by at least two links, and Google has the updated sitemap.

The ID card nobody reads

Every page carries hidden structured information that tells Google and AI assistants who the practice is, who the providers are, and what the page covers. Patients never see it. The homepage version had 31 errors and 19 warnings in schema.org's own validator.

Some were vocabulary: words the standard does not have, used where it expects something else. Some were facts. Nurse practitioners were labeled as physicians. The practice name did not match its Google Business Profile. Nine page types now show 0 errors and 0 warnings on the live site.

After we thought we were done, we added one more check: does the hidden FAQ information say only what the visible page says? Google requires that. It did not. The hidden answer about insurance named plans the visible answer did not. That is fixed, and the check now runs on every site we look at.

Our own check was wrong too

The first draft of the report said the site started at 92.4. That draft counted the way the www address redirects as a problem. It is actually the setup the browsers' HSTS preload security list requires. We corrected the check and recalculated the same October 13 measurement: 95.5. The client's report says so in plain words.

The part that broke

We also turned on automatic image resizing. It made photos far smaller: the homepage photo went from 142 KB to 48 KB. Under heavy testing traffic it stalled, and for eight minutes on the morning of October 14 some photos did not load. The pages themselves stayed up.

We restarted it, then removed it the same hour, and tested again: 48 image requests at once, every one answered in under half a second. Resizing comes back only after it passes a load test away from the live site. That is now a written rule in the checklist, not a lesson we hope to remember.

Speed has two numbers

Google measures speed two ways. The one that counts for search is what real visitors on Chrome experienced over the last 28 days. On phones, the main content appeared in 2.2 seconds, under Google's 2.5 second bar. On computers, 1.2 seconds.

The other is a lab test on a simulated slow phone. It is harsher, and it is still the weakest number: 68 to 76 out of 100 across the pages we tested. Computers are 98 to 100. Single lab runs swing by up to 10 points (the homepage scored 90, 99 and 99 in three back-to-back runs), so we report the middle of three.

Real phones already pass. The slow-phone number is the next thing to improve, not something broken.

If you own a practice website

Three questions worth asking whoever runs it:

• Which of our pages has Google actually indexed? Page by page, not just a score.
• Do our menus and FAQ answers exist before someone clicks, or only after?
• When was our hidden practice information last run through a validator, and how many errors did it show?

Making pages readable and reachable makes them eligible to appear in Google. It does not guarantee a ranking, and nobody can honestly promise one. We run Google's inspection again in four weeks and will add what it finds here.